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Disable blue arrows icon on folders and files in Windows 10

In Windows 10, you might notice a blue arrows overlay icon for some folders and files. It looks like a pair of blue arrows pointing at each other. You might be curious what this overlay icon indicates and how to disable it. You will find the answer in this article.

If you are a regular Winaero reader, you might be already knowing about CompactOS, the new compression mechanism introduced in Windows 10. It is intended to save some notable amount of disk space for SSD owners and mobile device users.

The blue arrows overlay icon on a folder or a file indicates that it is compressed using NTFS file system compression to save disk space. The addition of the overlay icon itself is new to Windows 10 File Explorer.

If you are not happy to see this blue overlay icon, here is how you can disable it.

Download the ZIP archive which contains the empty icon. It will be used instead of the blue arrows icon.

About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.